Accurate customer demand data is important to print shop design, projection of operational costs for a print shop, determining contract pricing and performing customer account management. Typically, historical demand data is collected by examining print jobs that have been processed over an extended period of time. This process is costly and inefficient. The demand pattern often exhibits seasonality, and demand data must be collected over a long period of time to characterize such variability. As such, there is often a significant lead time before historical demand data can be utilized.
In addition, historical demand data may not accurately represent a future demand pattern, especially in a highly dynamic market where demand constantly fluctuates with pricing, competition, economic conditions and/or the like. To adjust for changes to future market conditions, the collected historical demand data is typically scaled up or down using ad hoc methods. As such, little consideration is given to the preservation of characteristics of historical demand patterns in the collected historical demand data. This process often results in inaccurate projections of future demand, which leads to inefficient print job designs, incorrect estimation of operational costs and failure to provide meaningful insights regarding contract pricing and customer account management.
The commonly used ARENA simulation tool can generate voluminous demand data from historical records. However, it models job quantities by drawing randomly from the historical distribution which allows no adjustments to be made for market outlook. Furthermore, customer demand in the printing service industry is structurally complex, and print shop operations are highly dependent on job arrival rates and quantities, as well as job type mix and job content. ARENA does not consider job type mix or job content, and therefore cannot model such properties. In addition, ARENA models customer demand based on a nominal number of hours, such as 24 hours per day, rather than a number of operating hours. This analysis skews the job arrival process and yields unrealistic demand projections where print shops rarely operate continuously throughout a day. As such, simulation tools such as ARENA are unable to accommodate discontinuous operating hours, model complex structure of customer demand or adjust projections to market outlook.